Page 156 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 137
Roshal’s Jewish characters have the responsibility of disciplining their own. In this
sense, the film is an epitaph for the national policies of the 1920s.
Stalin’s struggle against ‘rightist deviation’ with the Party was accompanied by
increased centralisation and diminishing national autonomy. As early as 1927,
Ukrainian ‘nationalists’ were removed from prominent positions; two years later,
there were similar purges in Belorussia, Armenia and Turkestan, while leading
Jewish communists came under fire for ‘idealising’ the pre-Revolutionary Jewish
labour movement. Since the early 1920s, the Party had successfully channelled the
Yevsektsiya’s anti-bourgeois antagonism, using the Jewish Section to police the
Jewish street. Now, the Party would intimidate these same activists by raising the
spectre of their Bundist past. The beleaguered Yevsektsiya made plans for its first
conference since 1926. In January 1930, however, the leadership of the republics’
communist parties met and ‘reorganised’, dissolving all national sections. 30
It was at this very moment that the development of sound threatened the
universality of the silent film, raising anew the question of national cinemas. Yuli
Raizman’s The Earth Thirsts [Zemlya zhazhdet, 1930] all but allegorised this
dilemma. In this late silent, produced by Vostokkino (a studio created in 1928 to
make films for the Crimea, North Caucasus and Volga regions, as well as Siberia
and Buryat-Mongolia) and re-released in 1931 with a postsynchronous soundtrack,
a group of idealistic young engineers (one Russian, one Turkmen, one Jew, one
Ukrainian, one Georgian–all communists) band together to overcome local
superstitions to construct a canal in a remote Turkmenian village.
Less homogenous in its representation of minority culture, Belgoskino’s first
sound film, Yuri Tarich’s one-reel Poem of Liberation [Poema imeni
osvobozhdeniya, 1931], featured traditional Belorussian, Polish and Yiddish songs.
Unlike the Ukraine, the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was organised as a
multinational state, with Yiddish one of four official languages. Many non-Jewish
Belorussians spoke some Yiddish which, throughout the 1920s and well into the
1930s, was extensively used on posters, street signs and building façades. (Indeed,
an actress who grew up in the heavily Jewish city of Gomel recalls seeing silent
31
movies with Yiddish intertitles. )
In 1932, Belgoskino went a step further and produced The Return of Nathan
Becker [Vozvrashchenie Neitana Bekkera], a feature-length talkie starring
Solomon Mikhoels, which exists in both Russian and Yiddish versions. The latter
(known as Nosn Beher Fort Aheym) may have been for export only; in any case, it
is only the incomplete Russian version which survives in Soviet archives while a
fragment of the Yiddish version has been recovered in the USA by the National
Center for Jewish Film.
Directed by Boris Shpis and Rokhl M.Milman from a scenario by Yiddish poet
Peretz Markish, The Return of Nathan Becker wedded Yiddish folk culture to that
of the first Five Year Plan, not to mention the Factory of the Eccentric Actor.
Shpis, who was not Jewish, had served as an assistant director on The Overcoat
[Shinel’, 1926] and SVD [1927] by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. His
first feature, Someone Else’s Jacket [Chuzhoi pidzhak, 1927], a satire on the NEP,